This summer the StarTribune carried a long feature article on the possible role of neonicotinoids in the delcine of bees.

A new class of insecticides first introduced in 1994 that is
relatively harmless to people and animals — neonicotinoids. Now added
routinely as a coating on seeds, neonicotinoids provide additional
insurance against soil pests. And, like the genetic traits, they become
an intrinsic part of the plant as it grows.

“It started in 2002,” said Chuck Benbrook, a professor who studies
sustainable agricultural systems at Washington University. “By 2006
neonicotinoids had cornered the market.”..

When it comes time to buy seed, farmers have a dwindling number of
alternatives. Three corporations control more than half of the world’s
commercial seed market, and the top 10 control three-fourths...

But the amount of land devoted to those seeds has exploded. Today in
Minnesota, about 24,000 square miles — a third of the state — are
devoted to growing either corn or soybeans...

Dozens of studies have now found that low doses of neonicotinoids may
not kill bees outright, but can cripple their highly sophisticated
navigational and communication skills, and hamper a queen’s
reproduction. Scientists have also warned that crops take up only a
small portion of the insecticide, leaving the rest behind in the soil.
If the toxins spread from fields into streams and wetlands, they may
ripple through the food system...

But from where Ehrhardt sits, between the big seed companies and the
end of their pipeline at the farm, it appears that the fate of
pollinators in rural Minnesota will come down to demand, markets and
economics. He sells all kinds of seeds to all kinds of farmers. He’s
keenly aware of the market for organics and the rising demand among
farmers for non-GMO seeds — the fastest growing segment of his seed
business. Both of those types of crops command a considerably higher
price at the local elevator than the genetically engineered crops.

Farmers, he said, would be happy to grow bee-friendly corn. “But there have to be consumers willing to pay for that.”

Minnesota regulators, for the first time, are
considering banning or restricting a controversial class of insecticides
that has been linked to honeybee deaths.

The
possibility, disclosed this week by the state Department of Agriculture
in a revised outline for a study of the chemicals, followed an
outpouring of public concern over the dramatic decline in honeybee
populations in recent years...

A revised outline published this week states that the range of state
action could include “restrictions on or cancellation of products.”..

Horan said the backlash against neonicotinoids was heightened by a
recent EPA finding that neonicotinoid seed treatments in soybeans
provide little or no overall benefits to soybean production for most
farmers.

This week The Dish notes that "the plight of the Yazidis still isn't over."

On Mount Sinjar there are two Yazidi militias resisting the IS push. They told Rudaw
that they had not received supplies for weeks. There are also YPG, PKK,
and peshmerga fighters in the area as well. IS has cut off the supply
routes to the mountain and the Yazidi forces are desperate for weapons
and ammunition.

The Yazidis are a Kurdish ethno-religious community whose syncretic but ancient religion Yazidism (a kind of Yazdânism) is linked to Zoroastrianism and ancient Mesopotamian religions...

The Yazidis are monotheists, believing in God as creator of the world, which he has placed under the care of seven "holy beings" or angels, the "chief" (archangel) of whom is Melek Taus, the "Peacock Angel."...some followers of other monotheistic religions of the region equate the Peacock Angel with their own unredeemed evil spirit Satan, which has

incited centuries of persecution of the Yazidis as "devil worshippers." Persecution of Yazidis has continued in their home communities within the borders of modern Iraq, under both Saddam Hussein and fundamentalist Sunni Muslim revolutionaries. In August 2014 the Yazidis were targeted by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria in its campaign to "purify" Iraq and neighboring countries of non-Islamic influences...

Yazidism is not an offshoot of another religion, but shows influence from the many religions of the Middle East. Core Yazidi cosmology has a pre-Zoroastrian Iranian origin, but Yazidism also includes elements of ancient nature-worship, as well as influences from Christianity, Gnosticism, Zoroastrianism, Islam and Judaism....

Both images cropped to fit without removing watermarks. Top image (a refugee, not a hostage) from The Daily Mail. Thumbnail image credit Feriq Ferec/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images via The Dish.

I created a "cheerful" category for blog posts (now with 200+ entries) because some days after surfing the internet for news and stories, one needs some lighter fare.

Bryan College (a Tennessee Christian liberal arts college) apparently has a feature at its home basketball games where one student is given an opportunity to make four consecutive shots (a layup, a free throw, a 3-point shot, and a half-court shot).

Making all four within a 30-second time period results in a $10,000 reduction in tuition. Gustavo Angel Tamayo, a 23-year-old student, had never played basketball.

This fits nicely in the cheerful category. I've watched it three times.

Dozens of websites have posted the results of Tutankhamun's virtual (CT-scan) autopsy. The best (most concise, least sensational) I've found has been the report at National Geographic's Education Blog:

What have these CT scans revealed about King Tut’s life and death?
Not much that wasn’t already known, actually...

King Tut was probably ill for most of his life. The autopsy reveals he probably had a clubfoot or Kohler disease,
which prevented him from participating in vigorous activity (such as
chariot-riding). He also suffered from genetic illnesses and malaria...

...they studied the 130 walking canes buried with the Boy King. Many
archaeologists thought these canes were symbols of the pharaoh’s power,
but the new “virtual autopsy” research indicates he actually needed them
for walking.

In the 193-nation assembly, 188
countries voted for the nonbinding resolution, titled "Necessity of
Ending the Economic, Commercial and Financial Embargo imposed by the
United States of America against Cuba."

As in previous years, the only countries that voted against the declaration were the United States and an ally, Israel...

While the General Assembly's vote is nonbinding
and symbolic, it serves to highlight U.S. isolation regarding Havana. It
is one of very few issues where all of Washington's Western allies part
ways with the United States...

Washington broke diplomatic ties and imposed a
comprehensive trade embargo on the Communist-run Caribbean island more
than half a century ago during the Cold War. Its policy today appears to
be influenced by domestic politics in Florida, where Cuban exiles have
opposed any conciliation with former President Fidel Castro or current
President Raul Castro, who took over for his brother in 2008.

This ludicrous policy has been maintained now for about 50 years. Presumably by now the Kennedy family has smoked all of the 1,200 Cuban cigars JFK imported right before he imposed the ban on commerce.

This young woman volunteered to walk around the streets of New York for ten hours, walking behind a companion who had a GoPro camera mounted on his backpack. She is holding a microphone in both hands to record the comments directed at her during her walk, which have been clarified with captions in the 2-minute video. The video is edited; she received about ten unsolicited comments per hour of walking.

Via Reddit, where the discussion thread focuses on the creepy guy who walks beside her for five minutes silently.

This elaborate "desk set" (calculator, pen, note pad) arrived unsolicited in the mail this week, from the Disabled Veterans National Foundation. Because our family does donate money to charities, and because I know they exchange (or sell) names of donors to one another, I'm never surprised when new appeals arrive in the mail.

So I decided to investigate. My first stop was Charity Navigator, an unbiased resource for those who wish to give to charities. Unfortunately, this was their response: "We don't evaluate Disabled Veterans National Foundation.
Why not? We require 4 years of Forms 990 to complete an evaluation."

Claims made about the percentage of donations
going to charity are not the only contradictions AIP found when
investigating DVNF. "For 35 years we have been putting service
to others before ourselves," says one DVNF solicitation. This
is an interesting statement considering the charity was not incorporated
until November 2007, according to its 2008 tax form...

According to that AIP member, DVNF first sent a large plastic envelope
containing a calculator and planner which she had not requested,
along with a contribution form. They later sent her a follow-up
solicitation asking "Did you receive the Patriotic Calculator
and Planner Set I sent you?" This statement was printed in
red letters above her name and address on the envelope next to a
photo of an injured soldier being carried into a helicopter on a
stretcher. Charities that mail unrequested gifts while at the same
time requesting contributions are trying to guilt you into giving,
in AIP's opinion. Donors should be aware that they are under no
legal or, for that matter, moral obligation to send contributions
in response to gifts they have not requested...

The language in this solicitation could lead potential donors to
believe that the charity seeks funds primarily for direct assistance
to veterans, which is not the case. According to DVNF's 2008 audit,
only $127,421 or less than 1% of DVNF's $16.3 million budget could
have been spent on grants or aid to individuals. Except for this
amount and a $40,000 unrestricted grant to a related party, all
the rest of DVNF's reported program expenses of $4.5 million were
direct mail related.

In fairness, I'll note this evaluation was posted in August of 2010, so there may be newer data. But I'll give this one a pass.

Update: I wrote the above on April 30. Yesterday, as predicted, the followup request arrives, not as an "invoice," but as a "receipt verification form." The reply form reads "YES! I received the calculator and 14 month planner. I want to honor the disabled American heroies whokeep our nation safe! To help these courageous men and women get the respect & benefits their military service earned, here's my gift of..."

A national charity that vows to help disabled veterans and their
families has spent tens of millions on marketing services, all the while
doling out massive amounts of candy, hand sanitizer bottles and many
other unnecessary items to veteran aid groups, according to a CNN
investigation.

The Disabled Veterans National Foundation,
based in Washington, D.C., and founded in 2007, received about $55.9
million in donations since it began operations in 2007, according to
publicly available IRS 990 forms.

Yet according to the DVNF's tax filings with the IRS, almost none of that money has wound up in the hands of American veterans.

Instead, the charity made
significant payments to Quadriga Art LLC, which owns two direct-mail
fundraising companies hired by the DVNF to help garner donations,
according to publicly available IRS 990 forms...

DVNF specifically cited a
small veterans charity called St. Benedict's. But the charity's
executive director said most of the donations from DVNF could hardly be
classified as "badly needed."

"They sent us 2,600 bags
of cough drops and 2,200 little bottles of sanitizer," J.D. Simpson
told CNN. "And the great thing was, they sent us 11,520 bags of coconut
M&M's. And we didn't have a lot of use for 11,520 bags of coconut
M&M's... "

In one instance, the DVNF claimed more than $838,000 in fair market value donations to a small charity called US Vets in Prescott, Arizona. CNN obtained the bill of
lading for that shipment, which showed that, among other things,
hundreds of chefs coats and aprons were included in the delivery, along
with a needlepoint design pillowcase and cans of acrylic paint. The
goods listed in the two-page shipping document were things "we don't
need," a US Vets spokesman said.

More at the link. Many "charities" that ask for your money use a similar ploy. They request free items from corporations - "gifts in kind" - then declare an inflated "market value" of those gifts when they give them away, which they use to offset the cash contributions they get from you. The corporations in turn, of course, declare some value for these "gifts in kind" to deduct on their state and federal tax statements as charitable contributions to lower their taxes.

"Todd is the most typical of American men. His proportions are based on averages from CDC anthropometric data.
As a U.S. male age 30 to 39, his body mass index (BMI) is 29; just one
shy of the medical definition of obese. At five-feet-nine-inches tall,
his waist is 39 inches."

From The Atlantic, where this body habitus is compared to those derived from databases in three other countries (Japan, France, and The Netherlands). Here the average American is compared to the average man in the Netherlands:

"Americans are also losing ground in height. For most of two centuries, until 60 years ago, the U.S. population was the tallest in the world.
Now the average American man is three inches shorter than the Dutch
man, who averages six feet. Japanese averages are also gaining on
Americans'.

A reminder that the English language evolved at a time when the counting system involved a "long hundred" equal to 120.

The long hundred, a unit of count = 120, appears to have arisen out of an ancient Germanic way of counting, one which is echoed in modern English. The “teen”
suffix, as in four-teen, six-teen, etc, is not applied to one plus ten or two
plus ten
(they aren't one-teen and two-teen). Eleven and twelve are treated the same way
as the first ten numerals; the break is after twelve, not ten... Note that this is not a duodecimal numeric system.

The use of the word in this manner lingered for a long time in England:

This reckoning of one hundred as six score still holds good
(or did to my knowledge ten years ago) in Leighton Buzzard, Beds. If one ordered
there 100 plants, for example, one received, and also had to pay for, 120: a
hundred being always reckoned as six twenties. If one required simply 100, it
was necessary to order five score.

So also here in Cardigan and around, taking eggs, for example,
the dealer picking up three eggs in each hand, reckons that twenty times this
makes one hundred.

Posted because this photo brings back pleasant memories of my childhood in Minnesota. Every fall tiger salamanders by the dozens would accumulate at the base of our outside basement stairwell. It was my not unpleasant chore as a youngster to corral them before they desiccated, and transfer them back to the nearby woods.

23 October 2014

When medieval binders knew that the object they were processing would be
placed on a lectern, for example in a chained library, they often added
tiny feet like the ones seen here. They made sure that the lower edge
of the binding and the bottom part of the pages would not be damaged by
the rough wood of the lectern - notice the shiny bottom of the feet.

Many years ago I spent a lot of time studying the life and works of Edgar Allan Poe (see this manuscript), but do not remember previously having read this account of his exhumation:

When Poe died, he was buried, rather unceremoniously, in an unmarked
grave in a Baltimore graveyard. Twenty-six years later, a statue was
erected, honoring Poe, near the graveyard’s entrance. Poe’s coffin was
dug up, and his remains exhumed,
in order to be moved to the new place of honor. But more than two
decades of buried decay had not been kind to Poe’s coffin—or the corpse
within it—and the apparatus fell apart as workers tried to move it from
one part of the graveyard to another. Little remained of Poe’s body, but
one worker did remark on a strange feature of Poe’s skull: a mass rolling around inside. Newspapers of the day claimed that the clump was
Poe’s brain, shriveled yet intact after almost three decades in the
ground.

We know, today, that the mass could not be Poe’s brain, which is one
of the first parts of the body to rot after death. But Matthew Pearl, an
American author who wrote a novel about Poe’s death,
was nonetheless intrigued by this clump. He contacted a forensic
pathologist, who told him that while the clump couldn’t be a brain, it
could be a brain tumor, which can calcify after death into hard masses.

I don't believe a brain tumor or any other body tissue would calcify after death (unless there were some unusual mineralogical conditions in the soil), but some neoplasms such as meningiomas and various metastases do calcify during life. Interesting.

In Maine, an elementary school teacher was recently put on paid leave for up to three weeks after parents complained
that the teacher had traveled to Dallas, where there have been a few
Ebola cases. On Sunday, a similar precaution was taken at a high school
in Phenix, Alabama, after an employee flew on the same plane as a person who contracted Ebola -- even though the employee flew a day later, long after the aircraft had been cleaned...

In Brooklyn Park, Minnesota, Ebola is killing business at a local
Liberian
restaurant. "We have had customers coming in and actually
standing in front of us at the counter saying, 'do you have Ebola?'"

On the upside, the business of protective gear is booming. David Scott, president of LifeSecure, told The Chicago Sun-Times that
his business recently sold out of a kit that includes "disposable
eyeshields, biohazard bags, protective masks, vinyl gloves and hand
sanitizer."

What they should sell are the sunglasses described in Hitchhiker, which, at the first sign of danger... go totally black.

Addendum:

(Reuters) - U.S. stock futures
tumbled while safe-haven assets such as the yen and U.S.
bonds gained on Friday after media reported that a doctor who
returned to New York City from West Africa has tested
positive for Ebola.

The department recorded 66,566 live births to residents of Wisconsin
in 2013, 633 fewer than the previous year. The teen birth rate also
declined, with a crude rate of 19.7 births per 1,000 females aged 15 to
19, compared to 21.9 births in 2012.

Note that what is being reported is not a decline in population (because of people moving to Florida or baby boomers dying), but a decrease in new births.

Speculation at the link is that this reflects a response by residents to the economic slowdown, which started with the 2007-2008 recession. And that this is not just a local phenomenon, but has been noted elsewhere in this country.

This week the U.S. is in the throes of its annual "March Madness" collegiate basketball mania, so it seems to be an appropriate time to provide some links about the recent scandal at the University of North Carolina.

Mary Willingham, a Learning Specialist teaching remedial skills at UNC's Academic Support Program for Student-Athletes, commented publicly on the abysmal educational skills of athletes enrolled at the school, most of whom had reading skills of grade-school children, some of them at a third-grade level and not having ever written a paragraph in their life.

The best video interview is this one from ESPN, for which I've been unable to find a embed code. In it she reports her experience with literally illiterate college student-athletes who were unable to write. They were enrolled in "paper classes" that didn't really exist (they just had to write a paper, not attend classes, and that help was given to them to write that paper). The classes were typically in African-American Studies (AFAM). She calls the situation a "scam," "a joke," that "everyone knew" and that the NCAA doesn't care about this. The video is definitely worth a four-minute viewing.

Embedded at the top of this post is a screencap of a "final paper" she showed during the interview, one submitted by a student who received an A- for this work.

- which includes the essence but lacks the punch of the ESPN interview linked above.

For the past three years, Ms. Willingham has been anonymously providing information about this academic fraud to the News and Observer in Raleigh, resulting in articles like this.

Until August, the university had resisted going back further than
2007 to investigate other potential academic problems in the department,
so it’s difficult to assess exactly what was happening before then.

Difficult,
that is, except in the case of Julius Peppers, whose transcript sat
unnoticed on UNC’s website until this summer. Peppers had D’s or F’s in
11 of 30 classes, the transcript showed, and was barely eligible for
football and basketball only because of a string of better grades in
courses he took in the AFAM Department.

... in which she notes that some football and basketball players at the University of North Carolina had SAT verbal scores of 280-300.

And this week the StarTribune carried an Associated Press report on the outcome of the university's investigation of the scandal, noting that the problem extended beyond the athletes to include regular students:

A scandal involving bogus classes and inflated grades at the University
of North Carolina was bigger than previously reported, encompassing
about 1,500 athletes who got easy A's and B's over a span of nearly two
decades, according to an investigation released Wednesday...

Many at the university hoped Wainstein's eight-month investigation would
bring some closure. Instead, it found more academic fraud than previous
investigations by the NCAA and the school...

The focus was courses that required only a research paper that was often
scanned quickly by a secretary, who gave out high grades regardless of
the quality of work. The report also outlined how counselors for
athletes steered struggling students to the classes, with two counselors
even suggesting grades. Several knew the courses were easy and didn't
have an instructor...

Some news videos of the discovery have described the procedure of cranial deformation as a "rite of passage into adulthood," but clearly deformation to this degree has to be undertaken on a pliable skull of an infant.

There's more information at the Artificial Cranial Deformation page at Wikipedia, where I found the image at right ("Painting by Paul Kane, showing a Chinookan child in the process of having its head flattened, and an adult after the process") and these notes:

Early examples of intentional human cranial deformation predate written history and date back to 45,000 BC in Neanderthal skulls, and to the Proto-Neolithic Homo sapiens component (12th millennium BCE) from Shanidar Cave in Iraq. It occurred among Neolithic peoples in SW Asia.
The earliest written record of cranial deformation dates to 400 BC in Hippocrates' description of the Macrocephali or Long-heads, who were named for their practice of cranial modification.

...they owe their strange appearance not to the blind hand of evolution but
to the guiding hand of humanity. Australia's ancient inhabitants were
among the first in the world to deliberately transform the shape of
their own skulls...

H. erectus had a wide skull and a small braincase, while the
unusual Australian skulls are narrow and have large braincases, just
like today’s humans do. This makes it highly unlikely that their flat
foreheads were shaped by ancient H. erectus genes - and far more likely that they were actually sculpted by human hands...

The modern counterpart to this occurs when parents place babies on their backs to minimize the chances of SIDS:

Encouraging parents to routinely putting babies to sleep on their backs
before their soft skulls harden led to a dramatic increase in cases of plagiocephaly,
also known as flat head syndrome. A study published last year found
almost half of a sample of 440 healthy young babies attending two
clinics in Calgary, Canada, showed signs of it.

I believe I visited the flagship Half-Price Books store when it opened in Dallas in the 1970s, and I still shop at the local one here in Madison. An article at Fortune describes the remarkable rise of this classic bootstrap business, and why it continues to thrive.

[In 1972] They found a 2,000-square-foot location on Lovers Lane in Dallas. It was
a ratty old laundromat. The monthly rent was $174. We cleaned it up,
built our own shelves, and painted it. We’d load the trucks, unstop the
toilet, everything...

There weren’t many bookstores at all back then. Ours was an original
concept. Pat and Ken wanted to make sure there were affordable reading
options for everyone in a comfortable, inviting place to shop. By buying
all the items people brought in, they weren’t censoring anyone. We’d
pay cash for anything printed or recorded except yesterday’s newspaper,
which meant we had current offerings to sell. It was different from
other used bookstores, where you traded for books, or high-end
antiquarian stores, which intimidated people. We did so well, we opened
our second location eight months later in a former meat-storage place... But we never were fancy people, so I don’t think we would have noticed
any hardships. We ate ravioli out of a can and hamburger casseroles...

I became president and CEO. I was scared to death. It was 1995, and I was 37... In 1995 we had 55 stores, with $50 million in sales. I had had no formal education... We only did what we could afford to pay for, so we always operated on a cash basis... Because we are private and don’t have to answer to shareholders, we can
expand at our own pace. Plus, our inventory is different than most
traditional book retailers’ and is lower in cost, so that gives us a
different customer base. We’re trying to be a bookstore, record store,
antiquarian store, and comic-book store...

I could have been filthy rich many times over if I’d sold the company.
But I didn’t because I would have left the people who did all the work
to suffer.

Sotheby's currently has auctions for several beautiful pocket globes from the 1790s and early 1800s. If you have a few grand lying around, one of these 2.5-inch to 3.5-inch beauties could be yours.
Globemaking required the precise printing and placing of each gore,
or strip of printed material shaped like the rind surface of a lemon
wedge. In the miniature globe above, each gore represented thirty
degrees of longitude and were hand-colored. The outer case was notched
to hold a metal pin running through each pole for easier spinning.

Image and text from BoingBoing, where there is a link to the Sotheby's auction.

"In an effort to bring more
diversity to the artistic offerings in Carrizozo, Warren and Joan
Malkerson, along with David Mandel, the past curator of the Hubbard
Museum and all of its photographic shows, will host an open house
celebrating the grand opening of the Tularosa Basin Gallery of
Photography Saturday, Oct. 25 [2014]...

The gallery also will be
the headquarters for the newly formed Tularosa Basin Photographic
Society. The space boasts 7,500 square feet on the first floor.
"We have 14 photographers as members as of opening night," Malkerson
said. "We hope to grow to more than 50 members and also then occupy the
basement floor of that building as well, thereby having a total of
nearly 15,000 square feet of showroom/sales floor space. This would make
it the largest photography-only gallery in the entire state of New
Mexico. The subject matter of all the photography will be New Mexico.
All the shots have to be taken within the state aligning the gallery
with the new big push by the tourism board of the state for New Mexico
True. We will be the only photography gallery in the state to so
dedicate itself."

Update 2015: This month's issue of New Mexico Magazine presents a profile of Carrizozo in its ongoing series of articles about small towns in New Mexico:

Something interesting is happening in Carrizozo, a rustic town of just
under a thousand residents set at the intersection of US 54 and US 380,
about 40 miles northwest of Ruidoso. It has to do with art, and
exploration, and renewal in its many forms, and with the participatory
spirit that can take hold when a community discovers its own potential.
An effort is under way here to revitalize this town, bring in new ideas
and new opportunities, grow the population to a self-sustaining level by
appealing to potential residents like artists and retirees—and to do it
all while preserving the town’s historic character. But more
interesting still is what’s behind all this. Or, rather, who: in this
case, a diverse set of talented people united by their love of place...
Lured by the collegiality here and by the opportunities that Carrizozo
offers to both established and
emerging artists, like gallery shows and
inexpensive studio space, a number of talented individuals are choosing
to make this their home. In the past 10 years, some 20 artists have
moved here, bringing talents ranging from painting to sculpting to
illustration to movie-making. I decide my first day’s mission will be to
explore the breadth of that range...

20 October 2014

Those of you who live in climate zones with deciduous trees have the privilege of enjoying a spectacular show of color each autumn. Last month I visited the University of Minnesota's Landscape Arboretum. This past week I walked the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Arboretum, where I took these photos.

A 1968 contest to name the city’s new baseball franchise attracted
proposals such as “Mules” and “Cowpokes.” A now-deceased Kansas City
engineer named Sanford Porte proposed “Royals,” in honor of what he
called “Missouri’s billion-dollar livestock income, Kansas City’s
position as the nation’s leading stocker and feeder market and the
nationally known American Royal parade and pageant.” Mr. Porte’s entry
prevailed...

Soon after the team’s 1969 debut, livestock references fell silent. This
coincided with a civic effort in the 1970s to dissociate Kansas City
from its stockyards, where 64,000 cattle a day once transformed into
steaks and packaged meat...

Today, the baseball team’s connection to a livestock show is unknown even to team members... To some American Royal supporters, the team’s forgotten livestock link reflects persistent anti-cow sentiments... The American Royal is a nonprofit that raises money for
agricultural-related scholarships, in part via champion-livestock
auctions...

There are signs the baseball team is rediscovering its roots. In 2009,
it opened a Royals Hall of Fame at Kauffman Stadium, including an
exhibit detailing how the team got named. “I don’t think the livestock
heritage bothers people much anymore,” says
Curt Nelson,
the hall of fame’s director.

Molecular gyroscopes are chemical compounds or supramolecular complexes containing a rotor that moves freely relative to a stator, and therefore act as gyroscopes. Though any single bond or triple bond permits a chemical group to freely rotate, the compounds described as gyroscopes may protect the rotor from interactions, such as in a crystal structure with low packing density or by physically surrounding the rotor avoiding steric contact... the rate for inertially rotating p-phenylene without barriers is estimated to be approximately 2.4 x 10^12 per second (2,400,000,000,000 RPS)...

The human mind (at least mine) is not capable of conceiving of such behavior.

The derivation of the story is confused, but it first arises in the 1930s. It was published in Reader's Digest in 1940 as a letter from a naval officer who had supposedly received it from an enlisted man explaining his late return from leave. Hoffnung first saw the story in The Manchester Guardian in 1957; the version printed there is identical with the text used by Hoffnung, except for the location, which he changed from Barbados to Golder's Green. Hoffnung used the piece to warm up the audience before each recording session of One Minute, Please. In these performances he perfected the timing before the Oxford Union speech. The story was part of his speech in a debate called Life Begins at 38 and was recorded by the BBC. The tale itself was not, Ingrams comments, especially funny, but "[Hoffnung's] manner and delivery reduced his audience to hysterics".

I don't remember how I, as a Minnesota teenager in the 1950s became a fan of Hoffnung, but I was a reader of Punch and a fan of British comedy (Flanders and Swann, St. Trinians, The Goon Show) at the time, and thus had his interplanetary music festival records, which is where I first heard this presentation.

lt was an act of regicide that catapulted Europe into war - an act
that not unexpectedly took place in the Balkans. The region had been in a
state of ferment for years, and the assassination of the heir to the
Hapsburg Empire, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, by a Serbian nationalist,
was the culmination of a train of events leading inexorably to war.

Yet at first the monarchs of Europe did not take the incident too
seriously. lt was expected that the Hapsburg Emperor, Franz Josef of
Austria-Hungary, would demand and be given an apology from Serbia. By
now, however, Europe's leading nations were locked in alliances - there
was Serbia with Russia, Russia with France, France with Great Britain,
Great Britain with Belgium on the one side, and Germany and
Austria-Hungary on the other. With Serbia's apology not proving abject
enough, relations between Serbia and Austria-Hungary were broken off.
This finally alerted Europe's family of kings to the danger that
threatened them.

As the alliances clicked inexorably into place, a positive
snowstorm of telegrams between the crowned heads tried to avert the
inevitable. Kaiser Wilhelm II (Willie) was particularly assiduous in
keeping touch with his cousins Georgie and Nicky. But by now there was
nothing they could do. Their constitutional powers counted for almost as
little as their cousinhood. Although, technically, Franz Joseph,
Nicholas II and Wilhelm II could perhaps have curtailed the coming
hostilities, they were at the mercy of more powerful forces: the
generals, the politicians, the arms manufacturers, and the relentless
timetables of mobilisation. Ultimatum followed ultimatum. In the face of
national pride, imperial expansion and military glory, the
protestations of the crowned heads were swept aside. On such giant
waves, they could only bob about like so many corks.

16 October 2014

"Cured salted pork crafted as a nasal tampon and packed within the nasal
vaults successfully stopped nasal hemorrhage promptly, effectively, and
without sequelae. In both applications, the patient had complete
cessation of nasal bleeding within 24 hours, and was discharged within
72 hours after treatment."

Why universities like to hire adjunct professors ("“The most shocking thing is that many of us don’t even earn the federal
minimum wage... Our students didn’t know that professors
with PhDs aren’t even earning as much as an entry-level fast food
worker.)

Yet still another American medical care horror story ("He was blindsided, though, by a bill of about $117,000 from an
“assistant surgeon,” a Queens-based neurosurgeon whom Mr. Drier did not
recall meeting.")

Vinyl records are still popular; plants that press the records can't keep up with the demand: "Between 2007 and 2013, U.S. vinyl sales increased 517 percent to 6.1
million units, according to SoundScan, and that doesn’t include overseas
demand or sales made directly from record-label websites."

"Just east of the Andes, central Colombia’s Caño Cristales is a river like no other. Reaching 100km long and sometimes called the “Liquid
Rainbow”, Caño Cristales runs during certain months of the year with
shades of red, blue, yellow, orange and green in a vibrant natural
display that happens nowhere else on Earth." Photos at the link.

"Georgia police raided a retired Atlanta man's garden last Wednesday after a helicopter crew with the Governor's Task Force for Drug Suppression
spotted suspicious-looking plants on the man's property. A
heavily-armed K9 unit arrived and discovered that the plants were, in
fact, okra bushes... And that's not to mention the issue of whether we want a society where heavily-armed cops can burst into your property, with no grounds for
suspicion beyond what somebody thought he saw from several hundred yards
up in a helicopter."

“It was a floating museum, carrying works from various periods; one
bronze statue dates from 340 B.C., another from 240 B.C., while the
Antikythera Mechanism was made later. This was when the trade in works
of art started... Researchers believe the vessel may have been carrying treasures from Roman-conquered Greece to Italy." See also Return to Antikythera.

The title is the opening line from Kurt Vonnegut's 1969 novel, Slaughterhouse Five.

15 October 2014

"My grandma wanted to see the ocean one last time before checking into hospice. Her face says it all."

Photo credit to ecost, who posted this at Reddit, where the discussion thread focuses on praising Hospice personnel (and I heartily agree).

It's hard to see in the embedded image (better in the original), but it looks like the wheelchair has large inflated wheels designed for beach transport. I didn't know such modifications existed, but they certainly make sense for residents of coastal communities.

Addendum: a hat tip to reader OrcaSister for this link illustrating the beach wheelchair.

"In surface navigation, a cross sea is a sea state with two wave systems traveling at oblique angles. This may occur when water waves from one weather system continue despite a shift in wind. Waves generated by the new wind run at an angle to the old, creating a shifting, dangerous pattern. Until the older waves have dissipated, they create a sea hazard among the most perilous."

A cross swell is generated when the wave systems are longer period swell, rather than short period wind generated waves

Amazing. I didn't even know this could happen. You learn something every day.

The video provides a brief tour of Ile de Re, the tip of which is shown in the photo at the top. I tried to set up the video to start about midway, to focus on the enormous tidal fish trap constructed there but it didn't work, so you can skip to about the 3:45 mark to see the relevant portion.

I have seen other weirs and fish traps over the years, but never one as massive as this. After watching the video I went to Google Maps and was pleased to see that the structure is visible in the satellite view:

It extends out from the lighthouse and the beach (light brown in the satellite image); the scale can be appreciated by comparing it with the buildings at the bottom.

"We don't stray away from anything that's current or
controversial or anything like that," Weeks said from his 127,000-square-foot
warehouse in Banning, California. "If I told you we had a toddler ISIS costume
in the works, your mouth would drop."

Does he?

"I will definitely
let you know when that goes on sale," Weeks said. "I can tell you it will come
complete with a fake machine gun."

"Well, sweetheart, if you listened to QI podcast #25, you would know that there is an app that informs Icelanders how closely related they are to a new acquaintance. Additional details are available at the Icelandic Grapevine."

...two random Icelanders have about as much in common as second cousins, once removed, according to Dr. Kári Stefansson, CEO and co-founder of deCODE Genetics...

In early 2013, deCODE Genetics and the University of Iceland’s School
of Engineering and Natural Sciences challenged the nation’s university
students to design a smart phone app for the online genealogical
database Íslendingabók for its 10th anniversary.

The Íslendingabók
website takes its name from the Book of Icelanders, a 12th century
historical text which details the Icelandic settlement. Currently, the
database contains 810,000 genealogical records of “the inhabitants of
Iceland, dating more than 1,200 years back.”..

...one of the novelty features of the winning ÍslendingaApp: the
Sifjaspellspillir or “Incest Spoiler” alarm which alerts a user if the
person she plans on going home with is a near relation. Using the app’s
“new bömp technology,” users can tap their phones together and see how
closely they are related. If the alarm has been activated—it’s turned
off in default settings—it will either erupt with a discouraging siren,
or issue a gleeful “No relation: go for it!” message...

13 October 2014

Quilling or paper filigree is an art form that involves the use of strips of paper that are rolled, shaped, and glued together to create decorative designs. The paper is rolled, looped, curled, twisted and otherwise manipulated to create shapes which make up designs to decorate greetings cards, pictures, boxes, eggs, and to make models, jewellery, mobiles etc.

During the Renaissance, French and Italian nuns and monks used quilling to decorate book covers and religious items. The paper most commonly used was strips of paper trimmed from the gilded edges of books. These gilded paper strips were then rolled to create the quilled shapes...
In the 18th century, quilling became popular in Europe where gentle ladies of quality ("ladies of leisure") practiced the art.

The word "quill" as an avian appendage dates back to Middle English. Presumably early artists used to wrap their paper strips around quills.

The researchers suggest that autism may be rooted in an impaired ability
to predict events and other people’s actions. From the perspective of
the autistic child, the world appears to be a “magical” rather than an
orderly place, because events seem to occur randomly and unpredictably.
In this view, autism symptoms such as repetitive behavior, and an
insistence on a highly structured environment, are coping strategies to
help deal with this unpredictable world...

“At the moment, the treatments that have been developed are driven by
the end symptoms. We’re suggesting that the deeper problem is a
predictive impairment problem, so we should directly address that
ability,” says Pawan Sinha, an MIT professor of brain and cognitive
sciences and the lead author of a paper describing the hypothesis in the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week...

This hypothesized deficit could produce several of the most common
autism symptoms. For example, repetitive behaviors and insistence on
rigid structure have been shown to soothe anxiety produced by
unpredictability, even in individuals without autism. “These may be proactive attempts on the part of the person to try to
impose some structure on an environment that otherwise seems chaotic,”
Sinha says.

Impaired prediction skills would also help to explain why autistic children are often hypersensitive to sensory stimuli...

More at the link. I don't have the PNAS link, but it's a high-quality journal.

...sociolect: a language variety that’s spoken within a social group, like
Valley Girl–influenced ValTalk or African American Vernacular English.
(The word dialect, by contrast, commonly refers to a variety
spoken by a geographic group—think Appalachian or Lumbee.) Over the past
20 years, online sociolects have been springing up around the world,
from Jejenese in the Philippines to Ali G Language, a British lingo inspired by the Sacha Baron Cohen character.

11 October 2014

An excerpt from "The Golden Fly," a short story by Algernon Blackwood about a man with situational depression who finds solace in a natural setting:

He was a business man, honest, selfish, and ambitious;
and the collapse of his worldly position was paramount to the collapse of the universe itself - his
universe, at any rate. This "crumbling of the universe" was the thought he took out with him. He
left the house by the path that led into solitude,
and reached the heathery expanse that formed one of
the breathing-places of the New Forest. There he
flung himself down wearily in the shadow of a little
pine-copse. And his crumbled universe lay down
with him, for he could not escape it.

Taking the pistol from the hip-pocket where it
hurt him, he lay upon his back and watched the
clouds. Half stunned, half dazed, he stared into
the sky. The perfumed wind played softly on his
eyes; he smelt the heather- honey; golden flies
hung motionless in the air, like coloured pins
fastening the sunshine against the blue curtain of the
summer, while dragon-flies, like darting shuttles, wove
across its pattern their threads of gleaming bronze.
He heard the petulant crying of the peewits, and
watched their tumbling flight. Below him tinkled a
rivulet, its brown water rippling between banks of
peaty earth. Everywhere was singing, peace, and
careless unconcern.

And this lordly indifference of Nature calmed
and soothed him. Neither human pain nor the
injustice of man could shift the key of the water,
alter the peewits' cry a single tone, nor influence one
fraction of an inch those cloudy frigates of vapour
that sailed the sky. The earth bulged sunwards
as she had bulged for centuries. The power of her
steady gait, superbly calm, breathed everywhere with
grandeur undismayed, unhasting, and supremely
confident.... And, like the flash of those golden
flies, there leaped suddenly upon him this vivid
thought: that his world of agony lay neatly
buttoned up within the tiny space of his own brain.
Outside himself it had no existence at all.

I have been recurrently frustrated by the inability of cable television and electronic device makers to offer a remote control suitable for use by people with impaired cognitive function. My 95-year-old mother does not have a DVR, does not need a picture-in-picture function, and could never navigate through a scrolling channel-guide menu. When I explained our situation to the staff at the local Charter office, what they offered me was a similar remote with bigger buttons ("for handicapped people.")

I finally had to modify the remote using duct tape. It's not optimal, because some buttons get accidentally pressed through the tape, but it's way better than the original.

Addendum: A tip of the blogging hat to the many readers who offered practical advice in the Comments section. Also on further net searching I see a simiilar solution was devised by Marilyn at Nag on the Lake.

Addendum #2: Reader Matthew notes that there is a commercial product on the market that effectively does what I was trying to achieve with tape: Button Blocker.

"Tai-wiki-widbee" is an eclectic mix of trivialities, ephemera, curiosities, and exotica with a smattering of current events, social commentary, science, history, English language and literature, videos, and humor. We try to be the cyberequivalent of a Victorian cabinet of curiosities.

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I'm using an old photo of my grandfather as an avatar; he would have been amused.
Old friends, classmates, students, former colleagues, or distant relatives are welcome to email me via retag4726 (at) mypacks.net